ASHLAND – For many fairgoers in Ashland, a trip to the fair would not be complete without a visit to the west end of the fairgrounds to see the hay bales.
This year, the 28 large, round bales of hay are painted to depict range of objects, farm animals, movie characters and emojis.
The hay bale tradition at the Ashland fair began about eight years ago, after Mitch Johnson and his wife, Karen, saw similarly painted bales alongside roads in Tennessee.
“I was on the fair board at that time, and we’re always looking for new things for kids to enjoy and parents to enjoy,” Johnson said. So he decided to bring the idea home to Ashland.
The first year, the fair board painted just two bales and set them up near the pony barn.
Over the years, the tradition has grown to include a couple dozen bales stationed in a perennnial location near the speed office.
Local farmer Jim Beattie provides the hay bales, and the fair board covers the cost of the spray paint.
Johnson and another fair board member, Ben Carpenter, take the lead on painting each year, enlisting Carpenter’s young kids and Johnson’s children and grandchildren as volunteer artists.
“The first couple years, it took us all week,” Carpenter said. “Now we’re down to one night, and it seems like they get a little better every year.”
Carpenter said he likes to find design ideas using Google images. That’s where he got the inspiration for two of this year’s popular bale characters, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger.
Johnson’s daughter, Nicole Bumb, drove down from North Ridgeville with her husband and son this year to help with what has become a family tradition. It was her son’s first time seeing the bales.
“He absolutely loved it,” Bumb said. “As soon as we pulled up and he started to see the different characters, he started pointing and clapping.”
That joyful reaction is what keeps the Johnson and Carpenter families and the rest of the fair board painting bales year after year.
“People come in every year and say thank you for doing it because once you see them once, you want to come back and see what’s new the next year,” Johnson said.
In the future, Johnson and Carpenter envision making hay bale painting a contest, either asking people to vote for their favorite bale, allowing them to submit an idea for the following year or even letting them compete to paint the best bale.
